Rousseau, Nature, and

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Lecture 6

• Rousseau, Nature, and
• Gender-specific Education
• OR
• Doing Gender in the Woods

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Things

• From last class Gender and Water UK Big
  Brother episode
• Questions about presentations?
• SMU glitch/password

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Today

• Presentations?
• Mondays participation papers
• J.J. Rousseau on gender and education in/of
  nature
• Dorothy Smith, at OISE, worked hard to undo much
  of the gender and education) harm done by
  Rousseau and others who believed that women and
  otherwise oppressed/controlled people were not
  experts of their own reality.
• Remember in this class, we use terms like
  nature, gender, sex, and sexuality loosely that
  is, we know these categories are problematic when
  viewed through a sociological lens.

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Presentations
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Preliminary Social Synopsis of You in Nature
Timeline Handouts Outdoor experiences depended
on things such as

• Age 1-5
• Most had low exposure to natural world, some had
  medical conditions or injuries, overprotective
  parents
• Age 5/6-11
• Playing outside with friends in neighbourhood,
  had to walk back and forth to school, getting a
  new dog, joining Scouts and Guides, having a
  paper route, getting cable TV and video games,
  playing outside at babysitters house, access to
  ATV/4-wheeler, access to family or neighbourhood
  swimming pool in summer
• Age 12-15
• Yard work, family camping, traveling to other
  countries, parental divorce changed family
  dynamics, had no interest in sports which reduced
  options for girls, access to ocean, river,
  beach/summer cottage, went fishing with father
• Age 16-18
• First job, drivers license, sports league
  membership for males in class (mainly), tanning
  for prom, serious students in nature less
• Age 18/graduation onward
• Summer job, having no car so need to walk around
  Halifax, too much studying and working keeps most
  inside too long,

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Average Timeline Data (n 21)

• HIGH
• MOD
• LOW
• NIL
• 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
  11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
  23 24 25
• What social punctuation took most of you outside
  at age 5? What does that say about family values
  on children and nature from birth to five? What
  happened at around age 16 to 17?
• Since graduation, 11/21 of you are spending less
  time outside. Thats about half. Surprising?

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Jean Jacques Rousseau

• 1712-1778
• Born in Geneva father was a watchmaker
• His mother died shortly after giving birth to
  him, and his father held Rousseau fully
  responsible for her death and never forgave him,
  abandoning him totally on the street at the age
  of 10.
• (photo http//www.axonais.com/saintquentin/musee_
  lecuyer/graphs/rousseau.jpg information adapted
  from Hergenhahn, 1998 An Introduction to
  Psychology)

• He did his best to make lemonade. Rousseau stayed
  in school only for a couple of years, as the
  relatives raising him provided less than a
  standard of care. His health was poor, and he was
  usually starving.
• To feed himself, he converted to Catholicism in
  order to be fed by an order of nuns. This called
  his moral convictions to his own attention he
  felt bad by deceiving them, but he had to
  survive.

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By Rousseaus time

• European ideas had been strongly influenced by
• The Greeks Hippocrates, Socrates, Plato,
  Aristotle (What is the soul? What is truth? What
  is knowledge?)
• The Religious St. Paul, St. Augustine, Thomas
  Aquinas (How might we best seek the good life?)
  (paper topic look up castration of Peter
  Abelard and his love affair with Heloise)
• Seeds of Modern Science and Government
  Copernicus, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Comte
  (Humans are not at the centre of the universe,
  after all empiricism and regulatory control
  impose the best way to survive)
• Witch hunts (6-9 million women, and also many men
  and children, murdered for going against the
  church and state
• POSITIVISM had begun by the time Rousseau began
  to formulate meaning of his own experiences.
  POSITIVISM KNOWLEDGE EMPIRICAL
  OBSERVATIONSRATIONALITY
• (Empiricism closely related, includes more
  reliance on reported and observational
  experiences)

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• Gained money through illicit acts or deception
  most
• of the time was considered a real loser by
  many
• Known widely as a womanizer
• Age 32 hooked up with the maid in the hotel he
  lived in Therese - He did not love her,
  reportedly she reportedly drank and chased after
  local stable boys (Hergenhahn, 1998)
• Therese and Rousseau had 5 kids all of them were
  sent to local foster homes immediately (not the
  worlds 1 dad or the 1 lover, yet, oddly
  enough, hes known as the FATHER OF ROMANTICISM?)
• Romantic (word used for several hundred years
  by the French before Rousseau was born. It is
  traceable to Roman culture, but was used mainly
  by Russian (Slavonic) and European writers in
  love novels. If a novel was called romantic in
  Rousseaus day, it was generally denigrating that
  text --- remember people were beginning to
  believe that science, and not matters of the
  heart, could lead the way to truth!
• Romanticism trust ones nature and live
  according to that inner nature trust your own
  impulses each person is unique take the best
  from positivism and rational thought and merge
  that with your nature in order to know how to
  best live.

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• The Big Romantics Rousseau, Goethe (though he
  was not anti-science), Schopenhauer, Nietzsche
• Rousseau wrote on many things, including
  politics The Social Contract 1762
• A quote from the Contract Each of us places in
  common his person and all of his power under the
  supreme direction of the general will and as one
  body we all receive each member as an indivisible
  part of the whole. If a persons private will
  is contrary to the general will, he or she can be
  forced to follow the general will (in
  Hergenhahn, 1998, p. 186).
• Given this strong ideological stance, many
  feminists ask how women in Rousseaus France (and
  afterward) had a hope to be autonomous,
  legitimate social beings. The Social Contract is
  said to have been the Bible of the French
  Revolution.

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• Still, Rousseau fancied himself an intellectual,
  travelling to Paris to meet up with leading
  philosophers and academics of the day.
• This awakened his moral code, and he published
  The Social Contract and Emile
• Not everyone was impressed. There was such an
  outrage about these texts that a warrant was
  issued for his arrest!

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You might be familiar with Rousseaus opening
line in The Social Contract

• Man is born free, yet we see him everywhere in
  chains.
• What does this mean?
• He went on to say the first
• impulses of human nature are
• always right there is no original
• sin in the human heart. (Religiouscircles must
  not have liked that!)

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BAD MOVE ROUSSEAUFor one thing, This really
POd the government of the day --- who held
great power over the citizenry. The rulers
didnt want people finding out that they had a
human nature which would free them of dire
obedience to authority.Also, this didnt win
any friends in the formal school system, as he
believed that the best setting for education was
in nature, where children leave civilization with
a mentor to discover what their gifts are ---
what they are meant to do with their lives,
rather than to have it dictated by scholars who
based their decisions on the best career moves
(sound familiar???).

• It also put him in bad graces with the Catholic
  Church. While not a churchgoer, he aligned with
  the Protestants of the day who were beginning to
  believe that it was okay to think that God was in
  their hearts and not totally external to them,
  while the Catholics were fortifying the original
  sin formula within their rituals and belief
  system.
• Remember wherever there is state, church and
  school arent far behind! At SMU, how are state
  and church implicated in your education? SMU
  history site

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Rousseau on the lamb for 4 years!

• Philosopher David Hume felt pity for him and
  invited him to England in 1776. Their friendship
  dissolved when Hume began to become guilty by
  association with Rousseau, and gave him the boot.
• Rousseau died in utter poverty and squalor in
  Paris in 1778, likely of suicide. He was 66.
• Quite a boy. Quite a man. Quite an uneducated
  scholar, according to todays standards. And,
  yet, were still speaking about him today!

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About Emile

• Rousseaus romantic (naturalistic) notion of
  education is the root of todays free and
  individualized attempts to revise our education
  system in the west.
• Rousseau education should arise from natural
  impulses that is, the natural ability of each
  child (and adult) should guide educational
  processes.
• Notions of the wild child emerged from Rousseau
  and others, such as John Locke, claiming that
  children naturally belonged outside. Still, there
  were many sexist overtones about how girls were
  allowed to be in nature.
• Clip on artistic representation of the wild
  child How do the children raised by Rousseau
  compare to the same cohort of the industrial
  revolution (recall the videos from the first week
  on industrialized Europe).

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Challenging Emile

• Incidentally, the education of boys took up the
  majority of the book, while the education of
  girls got a chapter near the end.
• 1. (p. 217) What variable did Rousseau use to
  differentiate female from male? Does he use this
  to make one sex more superior than the other?
• 2. (pp. 218) What do you make of this Woman was
  made specially to please man if the latter must
  please her in turn, it is a less direct
  necessity his merit consists in his strength, he
  pleases by that fact alone. This is not the law
  of love, I grant but it is the law of nature,
  which is antecedent even to love. If woman is
  formed to please and to live in subjection, she
  must render herslef agreeable to man instead of
  provoking his wrath her strength lies in her
  charms.
• Could we go forward and trust the educational
  philosophy of someone who said this? How do we
  reconcile the zeitgeist of the day with the
  political correctness of the day? Can you guess
  the annual operating cost of the local Halifax
  Regional School Board this year?

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FYI Halifax Regional School Board?Bang for
Buck?

• Our annual budget is 345,004,600 of which
  260,546,300 comes to us from the Nova Scotia
  Department of Education and 83,020,200 comes
  from the Halifax Regional Municipality. In
  Harold Windsors (Chair) 2007 address, no mention
  was made of gender issues, sexuality was raised
  once. site Gender Report (http//www.hrsb.ns.c
  a/content/id/217.html)

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• 3. (p. 219) Educational Corollaries section
• In Pictou County, NS, the mantra for the
  Chignecto Central Schoolboard is Success for
  All Children. In HRM, it is All Children can
  Learn. How would Rousseaus following statement
  impact this inclusionary claim?
• When once it is shown that men and women
  neither are nor ought to be constituted alike
  either in character or in temperament, it follows
  that they ought not to receive the same
  education.
• Clip Gender and the first moon landing 1969
• (note that the interviewer asked 6 males and
  only two females)

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• 4. (p. 220) What variable does Rousseau claim is
  responsible for female-ness in this passage?
• Does it follow that a woman ought to be
  brought up in absolute ignorance and confined
  entirelyto the management of a household?
• No, surely this was never the intention of
  Nature in endow in her with so delightful and
  imaginative a mind on the contrary, Nature
  intends that she should think, should judge,
  should love, should learn, and should improve her
  understanding as she improves her person.
• So, it seems that Rousseau did believe that women
  could/should be educated, but heres where the
  differences begin

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• 5. (p. 221) Early Studies Needlework section
  
• Little girls, almost from their cradle, love
  dress not content with being pretty, they wish
  to be thought so In the case of boys the object
  is to develop strength, in the case of girls to
  bring out their charms.
• Many claim weve worked so hard at getting women
  into education that we dont know how to
  appreciate the stay at home women who love to do
  needlework.
• Did you have co-ed
• Home Economics in High School
• Wood Shop/Mechanics in High School
• Where do these organizations fit in the scheme
  of things?
• WINS Womens Institutes of NS
• CFUW Canadian Federation of University Women
• (photos www.purselipsquarejaw.org)

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• 6. (pp. 223-224) Moral Discipline Constraint
  section
• Comments?
• Girls ought to be energetic and industrious,
  but this is not all they should at an early age
  be inured to constraint. This evil, if in their
  case it is an evil, is inseparable from their
  condition. They will all their lives be subjected
  to an unceasing and unyielding constraint, that
  of convention. They must therefore be accustomed
  to restriction from the first, that it may cost
  them nothing their fancies must be crushed, to
  subject them to the will of others.
• Site NS Department of Education 2007

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General questions about Rousseaus Educational
Theory

• 1. Would parents let their children go off alone
  into the woods with a mentor in todays world, in
  order for the child to discover what interested
  them? Why/not?
• 2. Today, would we trust an administrator to tell
  us what is best for our children if they had
  their own children removed from their custody?
  Why/not? Can everyone be a natural parent? (Why
  do we have birthing classes? Breastfeeding
  classes?)
• 3. Here at SMU, how might there be students and
  professors freebutin chains? Is this some
  kind of irreversible nature?
• 4. How is/how isnt todays education on all
  levels connected to natural environments?
• 5. What would SMU look like if we incorporated
  Rousseaus idea that, in order to learn, we must
  first rouse our natural curiousity?
• 6. Do humans have a natural desire to learn, as
  Rousseau believed? Would you rather be doing
  something else that seemed closer to your natural
  ability? Where would that something else get
  you in life?

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• 8. (pp. 225-226) Teaching of Accomplishments
  section
• I am aware that strict tutors are opposed to
  teaching young girls singing, dancing, or any of
  the agreeable accomplishments. This is absurd.
  Who then is to learn them? Boys?
• Check this out.
• End of Rousseau dialogue can you see how he
  designed a natural inclination for girls within
  education? Remember ideas change over time,
  although many persist in various forms. We write
  about the world around us, and it is up to us how
  far we take it for granted. Still, even
  sociological thinkers find themselves in chains,
  as do activists.

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Monday Readings

• (1) NET Calverley, D. (2002). The Voyageurs, the
  backbone of the fur trade. http//www.calverley.ca
  /Part200220-20Fur 20Trade/2-002.html
• (2) NET CBC Archives The Birth of the Calgary
  Stampede. http//archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-69-750-4567
  /life_society/stampede/